Freud once famously said thaat sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. In fact, the Freud who said this might well be the folklore Freud. Still, the Apocrypha counts. Derrida famously tried to show that an example is never just an example, although as far as I know, he never approached Freud’s cigar ( he confined himself to Baudelaire’s tobacco use). I’m with Derrida on this. The cigar example is a good example of an example that goes a bit far, part of the identikit of Freud with the masculine-marked brown tube in his mouth. What is interesting about the fake saying is that it is supposed to be an example of something that isn’t an example, that will stubbornly remain the thing that it is, just the thing that it is. And in making it exemplarily non-exemplary, the fake Freud is offering us a counterfeit, something parasitic on a systems of markers of value that isn’t, as it happens, what it seems to be. How was the cigar chosen to be this exemplary non-example – that is the question.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads